A couple of people have contacted me, suggesting I take a look at an outfit operating in Carmarthen. A town close to my heart. Many’s the pint I sank there when I was younger.
Have a skinful in the old Ceffyl Du, and if we couldn’t find a party, or no student fell for my manifest charms, then it was the milk train back to Swansea High Street in the early hours and the long walk home. Happy Days!
This piece wasn’t really planned, and so it’s quite short, around 1,100 words.
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INTRO
The outfit in question is called LocalMotion. Here’s the main website. And here’s the website for the Carmarthen operation. Read it, look at the pictures, and you’ll see why I chose the headline.
If we go to the main website – HQ, as it were – we find, explaining the genesis of LocalMotion, the first example of a word salad. Translations are invited. Though I doubt if it makes sense in any language.
It’s all there: “collective . . . funders . . . collaborating . . . deep-rooted challenges . . . communities . . . shift power . . . decision-making . . . transformative change . . . “. If I wanted to take the piss out of a bunch of chancers looking to squeeze money from charities or the public purse I’d use exactly the same words and phrases.
But these people are being serious!
When I look at a crew like this I always check how and where it’s registered. Is it a company? A charity? Or what? Also, when it was registered.
First stop was the Companies House (CH) website, where I turned this up. You’ll see that CH directs us to the Charity Commission, where the registration is very recent – December 2024 – and what’s listed is ‘LocalMotion Enfield‘.
All rather confusing. Especially as an organisation named LocalMotion seems to have been operating in Carmarthen as early as May 2020. Certainly, according to this piece put out in 2022 by the Carmarthenshire Association of Voluntary Services (CAVS).
How could that be?
And if the charity registered is LocalMotion Enfield, and it tells the Charity Commission it operates only in Enfield, why the hell is it in Carmarthen?
There’s clearly something not right about LocalMotion.
But let’s finish this section with a bit more information on CAVS. Most of its funding comes from the ‘Welsh Government’. And half of this income goes in salaries, expenses and pensions. The woman with the biggest lanyard is on £60,000+ per year.
Grants also received to take out a lease on this building at the top of Castle Hill.
Basically, a publicly-funded job creation scheme for the otherwise unemployable.
And, boy! Has Wales got plenty of such schemes!
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WHO’S WHO IN LOCALMOTION?
Looking at the Charity Commission entry we see that the chair of LocalMotion Enfield is Parin Bahl. Who was formerly a director of Combining Opinions to Generate Solutions CIC, which was Dissolved in July 2025. Also a trustee of this CIC was Noelle Skivington, who’s joined Bahl at the charity LocalMotion Enfield.
The third trustee is Alex Tambourides. He’s CEO at Mind in Enfield and Barnet.
So was LocalMotion operating previously as Combining Opinions to Generate Solutions CIC? If not, then how do we explain the reference to an organisation operating in 2020 that didn’t officially exist until December 2024?
On the ground, in Carmarthen, we find Owen Griffiths, described as ‘Carmarthen Coordinator’. Griffiths is local to the area, and a recognised artist, having led the project to re-purpose the old Vetch Field in Swansea. (Such memories!)
Here’s a clip from his Linkedin page.
‘Peak Cymru’ is registered with the Charity Commission as Peak – Art in the Black Mountains. Here’s the website. Basically, another bunch of good-lifers and ‘artists’ who’ve washed up in Abergavennyshire, and now rely almost exclusively on our money – in the form of ‘Welsh Government’ funding – to lecture us on this, that and t’other.
There is, inevitably, a Corruption Bay connection on the Peak Board. Two, at least. There’s Sarah Dickens, former BBC journalist and communications advisor to the first minister. And Jenny McConnel, “Sustainable Development Advisor at the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales“.
Together we shape a creative programme that addresses social, environmental and racial justice in the context of South Wales
“Racial justice” for South Wales. Yeah, I lose sleep over it. People in the Heads of the Valleys worry about nothing else. I’m told there was a BLM march in the Gurnos last weekend.
Owen Griffiths’ link to the Centre for Alternative Technology is interesting. If you were sitting next to me now I’d be tempted to go: “Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more, squire”. Because in recent decades few money pits have had more dosh thrown into them by the ‘Welsh Government’ than this one.
I clicked on the email address the website gives for Owen Griffiths and this is what opened in MS Outlook:
Owen Griffiths is there to give the scam a Welsh gloss. And provide connections.
Two others are named in connection with LocalMotion in Carmarthen. The first is Project Coordinator Mariana Lopez Rojas, from Mexico.
It seems that Mariana’s full-time job is in Swansea, helping “asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants“, with The Centre for African Entrepreneurship (CAE). Though the website failed to provide any evidence of entrepreneurship. Unless milking the public purse is now seen as a legitimate business.
I’m so surprised to see “wellbeing” mentioned below! And as for “The Welsh Dream“? Shouldn’t that read, ‘nightmare’?
When she’s not helping asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants at CAE in Swansea, you might find Mariana at the Make and Mend Workshop CIC in Carmarthen.
The other named principal at LocalMotion Carmarthen is Ali Franks. Who seems to work as The Reconnection Coach. Is that on the NHS?
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CONCLUSION
Apart from Owen Griffiths, who may be no more than a figurehead, there is clearly nothing local about LocalMotion.
It’s just another gimme gimme bunch, demanding funding to spew out word salads that mean fuck all to real people. Money to organise one conference after another, workshops without end, seminars stretching into the distant future.
But most importantly from their perspective, is the promise of being allowed into schools, where they can lecture kids from sink estates about their white privilege destroying the planet, and their farm labourer ancestors’ responsibility for slavery.
LocalMotion uses a mission statement so hackneyed, and a template so well worn, that it’s clear they’ll simply duplicate the work (work!) of dozens if not hundreds of other groups already operating in Wales.
I would be very disappointed to see these buggers get a penny from Corruption Bay or County Hall. If they do, I’ll be digging deeper and writing about them again.
Let them sod off back to Enfield with their word salads and their insulting bullshit.
♦ end ♦
© Royston Jones 2026
